


Scotometrics

by shai



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Martin feels, and wild speculation, post episode 166
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24065941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: He should probably care more how quickly it's become... routine. They walk through a shifting world. They try not to notice when ground is tacky with blood or dense enough to somehow completely swallow the sound of their steps or any of a dozen other types of wrongness. The tower looms, and some new setpiece of horrors puts itself in front of them and draws John’s focus inexorably in. Martin thinks of similes about moths.
Kudos: 25





	Scotometrics

He should probably care more how quickly it's become... routine. They walk through a shifting world. They try not to notice when ground is tacky with blood or dense enough to somehow completely swallow the sound of their steps or any of a dozen other types of wrongness. The tower looms, and some new setpiece of horrors puts itself in front of them and draws John’s focus inexorably in.

Martin sulks, mostly, waiting for John to be done being the voice of the damned or the lens of the Eye or what the fuck ever it is. He’s been trying very hard not to snap at John, because it definitely must be worse to feel personally responsible for the destruction of the world than to have been a bystander for it. But it’s wearing, letting John use up the post-apocalyptic hiking party’s quota of Being An Uncommunicative Surly Arse. Martin's reserves of good grace are depleted and he's already fried his nerves looking out for danger. And then trying to prod John into explaining his newfound murder superpowers, which really, a person needs to know about. And he’s- 

A noise, behind him. He flinches and lifts the Useful Looking Stick he’s been walking with to a good hitting-someone-with-a-stick angle.

Oh. A yellow door, emerging improbably from a tree it could never have fitted in. Is that more logic-breaking or less than it being in the floor? Not that it really matters anymore.

He waves. Helen emerges, stretching, ambles over to sit next to him. She looks different, in this newly ended world: half her neat pinnafore dress matches the ground behind her and the collar has the same texture and colour as her neat bob of ringlets. Her face is hard to focus on, until she beams a bright smile, and then it feels like six different smiles at once.

“I thought you were getting out of here?”

She hums, neutral. He raises an eyebrow – or, both eyebrows probably, he’s never really known how to do just one.

“You people and your wanting explanations. Look, you just seemed down, sweetie. Why not tell auntie Helen your woes? I did give you information, after all. I’m an ally now.”

He’s sure she’ll be doing that grinning thing she does, the huge smile that always looks more a predator’s threat display than a real emotion. He was glad to have Helen there to goad John into talking, but he’s not in the mood to talk to even someone who can talk in straight lines, let alone her.

He keeps looking out at the horizon, back away from the tower and the dense-packed mine of dark earth that’s transfixed John.

She sits by him, tapping fingers on the dense-packed earth, listening to how it doesn’t make a noise. She sighs, then carves deep deep lines into it with nails that look like neat little normal semicircles when he looks.

No normal conversations to be had here, but hell – he does miss just having a chat, to anyone, without it being a whole thing.

“How about you? Sounds like it’s a tough time to be a… living maze of a person.”

She scoots in, close enough he can feel her body heat, whispers: “Still better predator than prey.”

“I’d rather not be either,” he finds himself saying. “And honestly it doesn't really seem like you do either. Can't you just try being a friend instead?” 

“I've tried that." She said, clipped. "And the Archivist didn't want to play nice."

Martin pictures John all curt and clipped at him for saying they should make friends with Helen. Well, tough, John's own judgement hasn't exactly been spot on.

"Well, if you want to try again, the offer's open." 

"Oh, Martin!” she says, all campy and – performative, putting on a voice, deliberate where Michael seemed genuinely unhinged. “How forward.”

He looks up. She’s moved back out of his personal space, a big fake grin on her face. The teeth are too many and too sharp, but that doesn’t make her any different from anyone else who still gets to make decisions here.

“I don’t know if we can undo this,” he says, calm, “but we’re going to try.”

“You’re going to try.”

“John and I. And anyone else … still left.”

She looks at him, holding his gaze in a way she normally avoids. Her eyes are deep enough brown to seem black. She shakes her head, such a small gesture it doesn’t feel at home on her. Or maybe it’s that it does, that it’s one of very few gestures that feel like natural human movements.

“I know it seems impossible… but I’d rather try something impossible than give up.”

“ _You_ would. Do you really think he will?”

“John hates this. He hates himself. He wants to try and put things right, he's just - still in shock. So he doesn't really believe we can."

“He’s...” Helen pauses, steeples her fingers, pushes her linked hands away from her palm outward in a way that made her fingers bend the wrong way and her fingernails click together. “What’s the right way to put it? Becoming a monster doesn’t make you a different person. You’re just you, but now you're a you who sometimes has to make a choice to go out and shake someone’s sense of self free from their soul.”

This isn’t relevant information, and she’d gone all chirpy-unsettling defence mechanism again. Martin watches her, waits. Wonders if she knows she’s doing that.

“It was his own nature that meant he could become the Archivist.” she says, quieter. “You know that already. You saw him chase after knowledge despite the cost, over and over again, and that made him a creature of the Watcher. He’s not a servant of a distant god any more. They're right here. That’s the whole point. And he - well, he’s a thing that beholds. He is the focus and the lens. He's watching the end of the world into being.”

“What.” Martin snaps.

“Whoopsidaisy. Shouldn't turn away advice from your monster forebears, I guess, Jonny-boy.”

“John is not the horrifying fear god!”

“Oh, no, of course not. It’s more...” She shakes her head, and the shape of her ringlets hangs like an afterimage in his eyes. “He ushered this in, and it’s not a fixed landscape, it’s – it’s very elegant actually, it doesn’t exist until you perceive it, and even then you need to keep seeing it clearly to pin it into place.”

“So what are you saying? If it’s all a – metaphor or whatever, where are the people? Where are our friends?”

“They are where they are, and the world around them is – what they make of it, unless someone else has made it something else first. Subject and object, remember?”

“And you’re saying John… perceived the fears into existence.”

“Well no, that's not quite how to put it, they existed already. But he understood how humans understand them, and that’s most of what they are, at the end of the day: things most humans can’t bear to look at head on. If you drawing all that knowledge into yourself, and pull it all together, and ask the world to listen when you put it all back out as one thing. Think about it a bit sideways and you can see how that – opens a door.”

“Well, I wish he’d bloody shut it again!”

Helen laughs, and he doesn’t actually find it scary any more, the way the sound is voices layered on voices.

She pats him on the shoulder and takes a step past a tree, and then she doesn’t emerge from the other side of the tree.

Martin wonders where he’d be if he hadn’t been with John. Remembers endless solitude and mist. Remembers that story of Peter’s failed ritual. He pictures the world where Helen’s right, where the world can’t be put right with John in it, and for a moment he wonders if he’s trapped in one of John’s nightmare-setpieces, wonders if there is an avatar of the Lonely who became that way by killing someone they loved.

“Shut up,” he says out loud to himself. “It isn’t all some stupid metaphor. I won’t let it be.”

And he sets off to towards the pit, back towards John.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, trying to remember the technical term for the bit of your visual field that your eye can't actually see so you brain just infers what should be there: is that too much of a galaxy brain pretentious fic name for this poorly copyedited pile of episode tag feels?
> 
> The very top of the wikipedia page about it, describing a cool gif: "A depiction of a scintillating scotoma that was almost spiral-shaped, with distortion of shapes but otherwise melting into the background similarly to the physiological blind spot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotoma
> 
> Me: ok nope, this title is a tribute to Helen, it is is meant to be.


End file.
